7. Find Your Motivation

The single greatest lesson from past ultra-achievers is not how easily things came to them, but how irrepressible and resilient they were. You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation (people may — probably will — come to think of you as odd). You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it.

And after more than 10,000 hours of exhausting struggle, what do most geniuses regret when they die? That they didn’t do even more.

In 1995, three Cornell psychologists did an extensive study of Terman’s now-elderly participants. They titled their paper “Failing to Act: Regrets of Terman’s Geniuses.” The profound lesson was that, at the end of their lives, Terman’s group had exactly the same sorts of regrets as the rest of the elderly population. They wish they had done more: gotten more education, worked harder, persevered.